Page 81 of Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son

“Wow,” he said. “Is he gonna want that?”

“Oh, he’ll fuss about it, and pretend old’s better than new. But he’ll love it.”

The boxes, when they toted them around the side of the house to the van, proved as heavy and as full of metallic clinks and newspaper crackling as the boxes Harlan had helped with yesterday. The cardboard was taped tightly shut, and unmarked, so he had no way of knowing what they were transporting, but he didn’t think they were boat parts. Maybe once he patched in, he’d be privy to that sort of information.

Once the van was loaded, and they’d shed their cuts and sweat through their t-shirts, Felix’s father – his name was Remy, he said – came out and invited them in for a late lunch of fried fish, coleslaw, and hunks of fresh bread slathered with butter. They sat around the small, round table in the kitchen, Gram with her coffee can spittoon at her elbow, and her gimlet stare touching every now and then on Harlan’s face, bringing up goosebumps on his arms despite the sweltering heat.

~*~

That late lunch would prove a touchstone over the course of the next two weeks. He returned to it, withdrawing into it mentally when he was mopping, or sweeping, or washing, or stepping and fetching. The perfect, flaky batter on the catfish, hot enough in the center to leave a blister on his tongue, cooled by swallows of homemade sweet tea. The low, rich timbre of Felix and his father speaking over one another, hunting stories that left Harlan acutely nostalgic for a history he’d never been a part of. The glass sweat rings on the Formica table, and the gross sound of spitting, because Gram could somehow chew chaw and eat at the same time. Flies buzzed up above the drafts from the fans, and the linoleum popped and creaked whenever someone shifted in their chair. The way Remy put another helping of fish on his plate, though he’d been so nervous he’d barely choked down the first, and said he ought to “fatten up” so he could grow into himself, but not unkindly.

It was such a modest place, that kitchen, simple, and dated, and a little grimy around the edges, though the plates and pots and pans and drinking glasses had been spotless. There was an affection and care between father and son that Harlan had never shared with another person, and he admired as much as he hated them for the ease of its existence. He had the sense the old woman knew what he’d spent years doing, though she’d barely made it to the table from the porch, and certainly hadn’t made it all the way out to the clearing to know that he’d watched Felix with his friends. Didn’t know what his real name was, and that he’d given a false one to the club. Still, she seemed to sense that he was lying, that he didn’t belong here, and he found something oddly comforting in her automatic hatred and distrust, as though she sensed that he might become important to Felix, and could even steal him away from their three-person family.

Wherethatidea had come from – stealing him away – Harlan didn’t know, but it sent a thrill down his spine that turned his knees to jelly.

He hoped that after being invited into the Lécuyer home, breaking literal bread with them, and being invited back by Remy as they left with a lifted hand and a casual, “See ya next time,” that he and Felix might become something like friends.

But he was busy, and Felix was busy, and so he revisited his lunch – glowing like a religious icon in his memory – while he toiled away at the clubhouse.

Then the whispering started.

He was lugging the trash to the cans out back, and paused in the hallway when he saw that the back door was already propped open. It was raining, fat sheets bucketing down in a white noise curtain that drowned out most of what Frenchie and Decker were saying, where they stood blowing smoke through the open door, heads bent close, brows knit and mouths pressed to grim lines.

“…dead,” he heard Decker say, and Frenchie shook his head.

“Shit. That’s…just shit, man. Do we know who did it, yet?”

The wind shifted, and the rain got louder, and Harlan missed the rest of what they were saying.

The next day he heard a name. “Oliver Landau,” Bob said grimly to Cat, who was named not for the animal, but for the milky, cataract sheen of his eyes, through which he could apparently see just fine.

Was Oliver Landau the dead person Decker had mentioned yesterday? No, it didn’t seem, when Bob continued, “It had to be him. Everyone knows Dee could get him to do whatever she wanted.”

Dee. It could have been an initial, could have stood for anyone, but Harlan’s mind flashed immediately to Dee Lécuyer, and disquiet like an oil spill pooled in his belly.

There was a new tension in the clubhouse, Dogs talking in hushed voices and brief snatches. Felix wasn’t around at all, and when Harlan finally worked up the nerve to ask Frenchie, thoroughly rattled by the funereal pall that hung over the place, Frenchie took a sharp drag on his cigarette and said, “His dad died. And his grandmother.”

“They…what?” Harlan’s heart beat wildly. “But…but I just saw them a couple weeks ago! The old woman – the grandmother – she’s old, yeah, but Remy…” He trailed off when Frenchie sent him a direct look, and he knew then that they hadn’tdied. They’d beenkilled.

Harlan went to the supply closet, shut himself inside, and, if asked, would have said that he was trying to find the Lysol, but, really, he pressed his hands over his face and fell back against the shelves, and spent a good ten minutes trying to get his breathing under control.

Dead? They weredead? Someonekilled them? He’d sat at their table, and endured Gram’s penetrating stare, and eaten the fish Remy had fried with his big-knuckled, fishhook-scarred hands. Had witnessed firsthand how deeply and unselfconsciously Felix loved his family, small and poor though it was.

And now they were gone. But why?

He thought of those heavy, clinking boxes, and wondered if Remy had gotten mixed up in club business, and if it was some kind of vendetta.

But a vendetta carried out by whom?

A snatch of overheard conversation floated up to the surface of his churning thoughts, bobbed there like plastic litter thrown in a lake: Oliver Landau. The murderer?

He needed to know more.

He scrubbed his eyes with his shirttail, sniffed hard a few times, and ventured back out into the clubhouse, where he was met by several guarded, suspicious glances and one hastily cut-off conversation when Frenchie thumped Dino in the arm and then said, to Harlan, “Hey, where you been? We’re outta Corn Nuts.”

Corn Nuts. Right. Of course. Because he wasn’t going to be allowed to be a part of the club-wide mourning for Felix’s family. He had to go getCorn Nuts.

“Yeah. Sure.” He snatched the van keys off the pegboard by the door, a whining in his ears like the day he’d beaten a nutria to death with the stock of an ineffective pellet gun. His throat got tight, and his face got hot, and he thought it was probably for the best that he make a store run, because if he stayed here, he was likely to say or do something that would get his prospect cut stripped and his ass booted out onto the highway.

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